In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [29]
Get your things together. We’re taking you back to Afghanistan.
I was just in time to collect my things from the cabinet, with the usual envelope full of money, before they dragged me away. We paid for the repatriation, as usual. This time, though, the journey by lorry was horrible. There were so many people that those who were on the sides were in constant danger of falling out and being run over, while those in the middle were in danger of suffocating. Sweat. Breathing. Yelling. People may have even died during that journey, and nobody noticed.
We were dumped across the border, like garbage dumped on a landfill site. For a moment, I thought the thing I had never dared think: I thought of not turning back, of continuing eastward. In the east was Nava, and my mother, sister and brother. In the west was Iran, and the same old insecurity and suffering and everything else. For a moment I thought of going home. Then I recalled the words of a man I had once tried to give a letter to, a letter for my mother, when I was living in Quetta almost three years before. In the letter I asked her to come and get me. But the man had read it and said, Enaiat, I know your people’s situation, I know what’s happening in Ghazni province, and how the Hazaras are treated. You should consider yourself lucky to be living here. True, things aren’t great, but at least you can leave home in the morning with the expectation of getting back alive in the evening. There, you never even know, when you go out, which will get back first, you or the news of your death. Here, you mix with other people and sell your things, whereas the Hazaras in your country can’t even walk in the street, because if a Taliban or a Pashtun comes across them and takes a good look at them, he always finds something wrong: a beard that’s too short, a turban that’s not on properly, lights still on in the house after ten at night. They’re in constant danger of dying for the slightest thing, being killed because of a careless word or some meaningless rule. You should be grateful to your mother that she got you out of Afghanistan, the man had said. Because there are lots of people who can’t do it and who’d like to.
So I stuck my hands in my pockets, wrapped my jacket around me, and set off to find the traffickers.
But this time, at one of the roadblocks on the way back—one of the roadblocks where the traffickers paid the police to turn a blind eye—something went wrong. As well as taking the money agreed on, the police started body-searching us, looking for things to steal. What was there to steal? you may ask. You were all penniless. But even from someone who has nothing you can always take something. I had my watch, for example. It was my watch, and it meant more to me than anything else. Yes, of course, I could always buy another one, but it wouldn’t be the same thing, it would be a different watch: this was my first watch.
A policeman made us stand in a line against a wall and passed along the line checking that we’d all emptied our pockets. Whenever he saw someone behaving oddly, or moving without permission, or making that odd kind of face—do you know what I mean?—the face of someone who has something to hide, he would go up to him and stick his nose right up against the person’s face and spit out threats and pieces of his dinner, and if the threats and spitting weren’t enough he’d go further and slap him or hit him with the butt of his rifle. When he reached me, he was about to walk right past me, but then he stopped and turned back and came and stood in front of me with his legs wide apart. What have you got? he asked. What are you hiding? He was thirty or forty centimeters